A new week, a new challenge.

• netcat is a network swiss-army knife; it allows you to create and connect (server and/or client) to network services.
• telnet is a great tcp connection tool, which many of you used when access your irc bots.

We've all relied on the ability to communicate in order to get tasks done. Well this week, you get to play with some of the foundations of what it takes to communicate.

What I'd like for you to do for me this week:

1. read about 'nc', a simple netcat tool installed on Lab46
2. create me a document that is a howto of sorts for netcat, along with interesting netcat recipes for doing useful and neat things; look up and explain some things you don't understand
3. figure out how to send text messages over the network, via netcat, so what you type on one end displays on the other
4. download, compile, and play with ncat, recreating some of the same experiments you conducted with 'nc'.
5. communicate with yourself (or others) from different systems; the systems you can use are: lab46, gnu, antelope, wildebai, and wildgoat. (note you'll have to first log into Lab46 to gain access to the others).
6. write a text message in a file, compress it with bzip2 (max compression), and send it from one machine (as one user) to another machine (to another user). You'll obviously need to work together a little bit on this.
7. create a netcat web server, and serve some simple file from it; using ssh, figure out how to forward a port from lab46 to your machine, so you can contact your makeshift web server with your web browser and display that information.
8. hot potato… can you rig up a web of communication points, using netcat, so that when one user connects and sends a message, it pops out on the other side (a different machine), and that message gets sent through a new point, and so on, having at least 8 connection points, spanning 4 different machines (be sure to describe the hot potato network you establish).
9. do some other neat thing with netcat and write it down on your document to tell me about it (note that you don't only have to use netcat.. you can mix with other tools you've learned).

Basically, “figure out and make useful” netcat. There's a lot of questions to be asked, and a lot of googling and book checking that is at hand.

Also, don't wait until the last minute… this really will work better if people poke at it throughout the week.

If you cannot find anyone to help with testing, and tossing a file around is at hand, just make sure the file, when sent, doesn't overwrite the original (on all machines, your same home directory will be present).

This will likely make some use of the pipe '|' operator we talked about in class. Make sure you understand this and put it to use.